Foreign Keys and Calvin & Hobbes

September 3, 2021

We're kind of all over the place today! Sleep, foreign keys, CommandBar, Calvin & Hobbes somehow, Vue, and so on.

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Transcript

Aaron
00:00:01 – 00:00:17
Okay. We're back. So we, I don't know if y'all saw, but I put out a bonus episode on the feed on Wednesday where I interviewed a guy that was using, Sidecar, which we can talk about later. But now we're back. Sean, Colin Colin.
Aaron
00:00:17 – 00:00:22
Sean, Colleen, and Aaron back together again. So, Sean, what's going on in in your world?
Sean
00:00:24 – 00:00:42
Oh, many things, but I wanted to tell you, I was I was just I was up very late last night playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends as I do most weeks. And I was driving home. I was well, sorry. I was playing, and then all of a sudden, I told my friends, like, I have to leave right now. I gotta go.
Sean
00:00:42 – 00:00:52
And I and I headed out. And the reason I had to leave was because Beth texted me the following messages. Are you home? Please respond. I heard something downstairs, and I am scared.
Sean
00:00:53 – 00:00:57
And then the next one was, well, I don't hear anything else. I assume that's you. Good night.
Aaron
00:00:58 – 00:01:05
Uh-oh. Oh, no. No, Beth.
Sean
00:01:06 – 00:01:07
So the best part It's
Aaron
00:01:07 – 00:01:07
not me.
Sean
00:01:09 – 00:01:16
The best part was, you know, I'm, like, texting her. I'm, like, no. That's, you know, that's not me. And she's not responding, so I called her. She's not answering.
Sean
00:01:16 – 00:01:30
I'm, like, okay. So I'm driving home, starting to drive faster, and then I call her again, and she answers. She is in a dead sleep, and she's just, like, why are you calling me? And I was, like, well, it wasn't me. She's, like, it was nothing.
Sean
00:01:31 – 00:01:36
It was nothing. It was just some noise. I'm sleeping. Oh, my gosh.
Aaron
00:01:36 – 00:01:37
And? Was it? Did you find anything?
Sean
00:01:37 – 00:01:48
There's nothing. There's nothing. Just like how she was so annoyed. Those are the texts that she sends me, and then she's annoyed at me for for waking up.
Aaron
00:01:48 – 00:01:49
Following up. Yeah. I just wanted
Colleen
00:01:49 – 00:01:49
to make sure no one killed you. Like,
Aaron
00:01:58 – 00:01:59
Wait. Wait. Wait.
Sean
00:01:59 – 00:02:00
I am not there.
Aaron
00:02:01 – 00:02:02
It's it's not me.
Sean
00:02:05 – 00:02:13
Like, why not know it's me? Why don't you just could you ask? You could be Sean, is that you? You know, like Yeah. There's so many echo you know I'm not there.
Aaron
00:02:16 – 00:02:18
Man, do you play every week?
Sean
00:02:19 – 00:02:32
You know, we try. We're all busy adults in our mid thirties that get tired. So every now and then, we're like, too tired, and then we don't do it. So whenever we have energy and everybody wants to get together, we do it. We've been doing it for, like, 7 years now.
Sean
00:02:32 – 00:02:38
We were just fixing that last night. 6 or 7 years. It's fun. It's awesome. It's fun.
Sean
00:02:38 – 00:02:53
It's nice. Most of the time, it's like half the session is us just chit chatting about about shit, so it's nice. And these are my friends that are all none of them well, I guess 2 of them are software developers, but they're not I don't feel it doesn't feel like they're in my, like, same circles at all, so it feels like a nice break.
Aaron
00:02:56 – 00:02:58
Yeah. Cool. I've never played. Not once.
Sean
00:02:59 – 00:02:59
Really?
Aaron
00:03:00 – 00:03:05
Nope. Colleen, have you? No. She said with disdain.
Colleen
00:03:05 – 00:03:11
I know. As that came out, I was like, I sound like a jerk. I didn't mean it like that. I don't The sperm go in it.
Aaron
00:03:11 – 00:03:12
Brow and the and the quick no.
Sean
00:03:13 – 00:03:14
It's fun.
Colleen
00:03:14 – 00:03:14
I believe you.
Sean
00:03:14 – 00:03:45
It's like, I mean, it's if if you don't like computer games, like, role playing games or that kind of thing in computer like adventure games and computers, probably not for you. But the but if you like adventure games and computers, then it's basically that, but, like, infinite flexibility because there's a person that's, like, creating the game on the fly, you know, with, like, a human brain in response to you. So it's totally only limited by, like, the rules of the system you use and then your everybody's imagination. It's pretty fun.
Colleen
00:03:46 – 00:03:55
I love the idea of having a game to play as an adult. Like, just something fun. Like, when you think about, what do I do that's just for me that's fun? The list is short.
Aaron
00:03:56 – 00:03:56
Agree. You
Colleen
00:03:56 – 00:03:57
know? There's so many
Sean
00:03:57 – 00:03:58
things we can
Colleen
00:03:58 – 00:03:59
do to do.
Sean
00:03:59 – 00:04:22
I started this I sort of provoked this into happening, like, 6 years ago because I was very, very, very depressed. And I was like, I need a thing that's just fun to do. And that was also, like, only a couple years into when I first started going on my own to start a business. So it was, like, one of my strategies for coping. I sort of realized I needed to do something like that.
Sean
00:04:22 – 00:04:38
And so I pulled in a few things. Like, I have anime night with my friend. He comes over every week. You know, we watch anime any other, and I have the D and D, and then I have exercise. And these are things that I've been doing consistently for years now to sort of keep my mental health in check.
Sean
00:04:39 – 00:04:53
And I feel like probably everybody in the pandemic, like, learned that they need to do stuff like that the last year. But for me, it was just, like, very like, no change. Right? And I already had all the things in place that I needed to, like, not lose my mind. We still gamed.
Sean
00:04:53 – 00:04:59
We played, online. Nobody expected we were gonna be doing that for, like, a year.
Aaron
00:05:00 – 00:05:00
Yeah. Seriously.
Sean
00:05:00 – 00:05:01
There it was.
Aaron
00:05:02 – 00:05:05
Yeah. That's a great excuse to just hang out with friends every week.
Sean
00:05:05 – 00:05:06
Yeah. It's great. The game
Aaron
00:05:06 – 00:05:09
the game is kinda secondary. Just being able to do that is awesome.
Colleen
00:05:10 – 00:05:10
Yeah.
Aaron
00:05:12 – 00:05:17
Well, did you win? Is that a valid question? It's not
Sean
00:05:17 – 00:05:24
a valid question. We've literally been playing the exact same adventure and campaign for 6 years. It just goes goes and goes and goes.
Aaron
00:05:24 – 00:05:50
I retract the question then. Yeah. Well, like I mentioned, I I bet y'all haven't listened to it because it's very Laravel specific and very recent. But I recorded an episode on Wednesday night, on our feed with a guy named Greg Skirman. He's in Australia, so it was, like, 10 o'clock at night our time and, like, the middle of the day for him.
Aaron
00:05:51 – 00:06:20
But I recorded an episode with him on sidecar, which is that Laravel Lambda, package that I wrote. And he is like, I mean, he's probably he's definitely better at using it than I am. He's the original, like, sidecar user. And he's using it in production and using it to render his, his React app. He's doing server side rendering on a Lambda using sidecar.
Aaron
00:06:21 – 00:06:42
So that was a lot of fun to, like, talk to him and hear, like, wow. You're using this thing I wrote in production. You've got this whole team of developers, and y'all are all using it. And so it was really fun. And if anyone listening is, I know a lot of people aren't Laravel people, but if you are a Laravel person, you should go back and listen to that one because it was a lot of fun.
Colleen
00:06:43 – 00:06:45
That's awesome, Aaron. Yeah.
Aaron
00:06:45 – 00:06:53
It was cool. He's he's super smart. Yeah. It was it was a lot of fun. He's a super smart, very nice guy.
Aaron
00:06:53 – 00:07:17
Amazing accent because he's Australian. So it was it was a good time. So I didn't wanna you know, on some shows when you get real into, like, the storyline of the people that are talking, and then they switch to interviews, and you're like, I don't wanna listen to it. I wanna hear, like, the storyline of the people that I got into. So I don't want to do that, but I did want to put it out as like a bonus episode kind of in the middle of the week, because I don't know.
Aaron
00:07:17 – 00:07:23
It was interesting. And I think he has a lot of cool stuff to say. So there you go.
Colleen
00:07:24 – 00:07:27
Awesome. Nicely done. Thanks.
Aaron
00:07:28 – 00:07:30
How's client land, Colleen?
Colleen
00:07:30 – 00:07:52
It's good. It's good. I'm working on building out some really complicated queries. And so it's really fun to kind of see that come together because I think so when you think about nested queries, I think in my specs, I go down to 3 levels of nesting. And so, this one I'm working on now, it's like 5 levels of nesting, and there's 2.
Aaron
00:07:52 – 00:07:52
Holy crap.
Colleen
00:07:53 – 00:07:56
Yeah. There's 2 as many throughs in there. So, it is like, roop, roop, roop, roop, roop, roop.
Aaron
00:07:57 – 00:08:02
Wait. Why what's 5 levels away that they're trying to get to?
Colleen
00:08:02 – 00:08:37
Well, it's the way it's not really what's happening is because the events table is like, I'm gonna call it a join table now, even though it's not really you know, it's the join table. So, the way the relationships are set up is you are going through events to get something, and then you're going back through to get something else. And then that has many, has many, down to whatever you're trying to search on. Mhmm. So I'm working out some of that right now, so that's pretty interesting to see and to see how that all plays out.
Aaron
00:08:38 – 00:08:50
Are we are you finding that we handle it out of the box, or are you having to reimplement? Because if we do handle infinitely nested relationships, I don't think anyone's ever pushed it that far though.
Colleen
00:08:50 – 00:09:07
Yeah. I think there's a couple things I need to look at. Specifically, their events table is our our glue right now between these relationships. So I need to look at how that's gonna be implemented. I think I mentioned that they were just kind of throwing some foreign keys on there, but the relationships have to be defined.
Colleen
00:09:09 – 00:09:43
So it doesn't work yet, but I can't say that it's because we aren't capable of handling it. I don't know if it's an error. I don't know what the problem is yet. It doesn't quite work yet. And so it's kind of neat to see what's happening and why that's happening and how that's gonna I mean, it almost kind of sort of works, but I think I get out to, like because I think it's if I if I recall, it's I get out to I don't have it in front of me, like, pages with a product with a name.
Colleen
00:09:43 – 00:10:24
Like, that's fine. But it was, I think, the Has Many Through events, views of a type, which are like different classes, where it's not quite working yet. So, it's kind of a fun problem. And, you know, I'm really happy because sometimes just setting up the problem space takes you a while. So I felt like this whole week was just me wrapping my head around setting up the relationships, because like I said, they were like, oh, we want this, this, this, this, but since the events table isn't really live yet, the foreign keys were there, but the actual relationships on the rails side weren't there.
Aaron
00:10:24 – 00:10:24
So I
Colleen
00:10:24 – 00:10:52
had to go through first and figure out what those relationships were and add them, and then I had to figure out how to write a system test. And you've seen the UI, so the system test was a little exciting. Just trying to figure which capybara element am I clicking? Like, how do I select that in a turbo frame? And so, I'm now in the position where I've got the the failing test, and I've got all the relationships defined for these 5 models that are, you know, intertwined.
Colleen
00:10:52 – 00:11:09
So I can actually now dive into what, our stuff more does, which is the the back end stuff to figure out why it's spitting out, where it's spitting out. But yeah. So it's actually a really good place to be in, because it feels like the the more fun work as opposed to the setup work.
Aaron
00:11:10 – 00:11:14
Right. The infrastructure work to get to the spot. I hate that stuff. Like,
Colleen
00:11:15 – 00:11:16
So I just, like,
Aaron
00:11:16 – 00:11:17
have to get
Colleen
00:11:17 – 00:11:27
it drives me nuts. Like, it I I cannot tell you the number of times. It's like, how do I select this damn select box? Because sometimes it works this way. Sometimes there's an element in front.
Colleen
00:11:27 – 00:11:29
Stuff like that is annoying.
Aaron
00:11:29 – 00:11:37
So are you using Capybara to drive front end, like, filter creation? Like, clicking on Yeah.
Sean
00:11:37 – 00:11:37
This is
Aaron
00:11:38 – 00:11:39
filter stuff?
Colleen
00:11:39 – 00:11:39
Yeah. Yeah.
Aaron
00:11:39 – 00:11:40
Cool.
Colleen
00:11:41 – 00:12:01
Yeah. So it's fun, though. So Andrew has magic test, which I got to play around with, which is pretty cool. It doesn't quite work for this use case, but it was still fun. And it's really ultimately, once I figured it out, like, how to use it for what I was trying to do, it really did speed up the development of the system test, which was pretty fun.
Aaron
00:12:01 – 00:12:18
Yeah. That's cool. He, so magic test is like a rails, like, helper that lets you, I think it, like, opens your terminal and you can click around on the browser and the 2 are synced together, and then it writes the test for you. Right?
Colleen
00:12:19 – 00:12:19
Yes.
Aaron
00:12:20 – 00:12:36
So there's a version of that. Andrew worked with a guy called, I think it's Matthias, and Laravel. And there's a Laravel version of that too, called magic tests. And so we have that thanks to Andrew and this guy, Matthias. It seems very cool.
Aaron
00:12:36 – 00:12:39
I haven't had a chance to use it, but it seems pretty cool.
Colleen
00:12:39 – 00:12:51
Yeah. It didn't work. The the whole concept of, like, clicking in the browser and then flushing it to your, you know, to your spec or your test, It didn't quite work, but, I mean
Aaron
00:12:51 – 00:12:52
Not quite so magical.
Colleen
00:12:52 – 00:13:23
Not quite well, he's very open about how it's in intense development right now. But even though it didn't quite do what I thought it was gonna do or what I wanted to do, it was really helpful with being able to, like, look at the individual selectors. I mean, because with the the turbo frame thing, like, it's just a little bit harder. For whatever reason, it was a little bit harder to, like, pinpoint the specific elements. And anyway, so overall, it was great.
Colleen
00:13:23 – 00:13:30
I'm super excited about magic test and its development, and that kind of annoying setup y part is done. So that's good.
Aaron
00:13:30 – 00:14:11
Yeah. I'll be curious when you so it sounds like you're in a spot where you can actually start doing the the refine work. I'll be curious when you get into that, what you discover, and if we need to pull anything back to the Laravel side. Because we do, like if everything is set up correctly in terms of, like, the models have the relationships and everything, all the keys and everything are there, if everything is set up correctly, in theory, we can do infinitely nested because, you know, we have that whole tracks pending, and you just add more pendings all the way through. So if you find that that doesn't work, we may, like, let me know, and we can bring it back to the Laravel side too.
Colleen
00:14:11 – 00:14:20
Yeah. Well and truthfully, I don't know if it doesn't work because the algorithm is wrong or if it doesn't work because I didn't implement it quite right. So I have to figure that out first.
Aaron
00:14:20 – 00:14:24
Yeah. Oh, such good data. Such good data.
Colleen
00:14:24 – 00:14:31
Yeah. It's I mean, I actually know, like, well, we don't have to we'll talk about it later. But, I have it's fun. It's it's good stuff to look at.
Aaron
00:14:32 – 00:14:35
Good. Cool. That sounds exciting.
Colleen
00:14:38 – 00:14:38
Yeah.
Aaron
00:14:38 – 00:14:40
Anything else over there?
Colleen
00:14:40 – 00:14:49
I did wanna ask you. You had dropped me a message the other day about databases not being able to handle a certain number of IDs. Yeah.
Aaron
00:14:49 – 00:14:50
And I
Colleen
00:14:50 – 00:14:53
didn't follow-up on that with you. Can you tell me more about that?
Aaron
00:14:53 – 00:15:00
Absolutely. So the context there is we, you and I, had talked, I think, on the show, but maybe not.
Colleen
00:15:00 – 00:15:01
I think so.
Aaron
00:15:02 – 00:15:30
You and I had talked about, a conversation you and Andrew had had where y'all were thinking about, instead of doing a bunch of sub selects and letting the database handle the sub selects, you were thinking about doing a query, pulling all of the IDs in to memory in Ruby, and then binding that to another query that you then execute. Right? So instead of having nested sub selects, kind of putting Ruby in the middle and taking the IDs.
Colleen
00:15:30 – 00:15:32
We had talked about that. Yes.
Aaron
00:15:32 – 00:16:01
There is a prob problem, and I don't know where the problem lies. I don't know if it's, in, for example, MySQL. I don't know if it's at the PHP library that binds everything into the query for my SQL. But I've run into it before where if you get too many placeholders so let's say you run one of those inner queries and it returns 20,000 IDs that you're then trying to use a where in to find later. Right?
Aaron
00:16:01 – 00:16:25
So now you've got 20,000 IDs in memory, and you're trying to bind that into a SQL statement and run that. At least PHP and MySQL will not allow that many placeholders. So it'll throw an exception that says too many like, I think it's error too many placeholders or something like that. And I think the max number of placeholders it's wild. It's like 5,000.
Aaron
00:16:26 – 00:16:31
But when you're talking about, you know, pulling IDs in it, you could end up with a 100000 IDs.
Colleen
00:16:31 – 00:16:31
Yep.
Aaron
00:16:31 – 00:16:51
So you would have to check, if that limit exists in Ruby and Postgres. I'm sure 90% sure that it does, but that would be a real problem because it wouldn't work. It would, it would fail at runtime for certain queries, which would be bad news.
Colleen
00:16:53 – 00:16:53
Got
Aaron
00:16:53 – 00:16:57
it. Does that make sense?
Colleen
00:16:57 – 00:16:57
Indeed.
Aaron
00:16:58 – 00:17:17
So I don't know where it exists, but it does exist. So something to be beware of. And I still think pulling it into memory would be slower regardless, but that's something that we can only solve by testing. Cool. Let's see.
Aaron
00:17:17 – 00:17:19
Oh, guys. I can walk.
Colleen
00:17:20 – 00:17:21
Yes. Tell us.
Aaron
00:17:21 – 00:17:24
Look at this. This is great great radio here, but
Colleen
00:17:24 – 00:17:26
look. Yay.
Aaron
00:17:27 – 00:17:31
I can stand up on my own. I can walk. I can get out of bed.
Colleen
00:17:31 – 00:17:33
Are your toes still numb? How are you feeling?
Aaron
00:17:33 – 00:17:49
My toes are still numb. Yeah. So I had the surgery. I had back surgery for herniated disc. I had the surgery on Monday, and by Tuesday, I could walk, which was not the case before that.
Aaron
00:17:49 – 00:18:06
So I feel great. All the nerve pain is gone. I have a lot of leftover pains. I mean, I was, you know, laying in bed curled up for 4 weeks, and so my muscles are all tight and fragile. And I still have numbness.
Aaron
00:18:06 – 00:18:21
So I have numbness on my calf down to my toes. My three outer toes are all numb. And I talked to the doctor, and he said that that could take months to come back, which was surprising to me. Months. Months.
Aaron
00:18:21 – 00:18:50
But he, so what he described was the disc has been pushing on the nerve and wearing down, I think it's the myelin sheath of the nerve, something like that. So that's gone right now, and it will come back. And as it comes back, the numbness will go away. So he released when he cut part of the disc out he released all that pressure, so it's not pushing anymore. But there's still some damage that needs to be repaired.
Aaron
00:18:51 – 00:19:03
But hey, I can walk. I took I took an almost 10 minute walk the other day, which was too long, and I hurt after that. But still, I can walk and I feel like I got my life back. So that's pretty great.
Sean
00:19:04 – 00:19:05
That's awesome.
Aaron
00:19:05 – 00:19:21
Yeah. It was pretty it was pretty dark there for a little bit, but I'm back. So feeling pretty good. Was back in the shed on Wednesday working and nice to actually be doing stuff again.
Sean
00:19:22 – 00:19:26
Were you actually doing day job work the whole time?
Aaron
00:19:26 – 00:19:46
While I was out like down? No. So I took probably, I took the whole 1st week off, and then I took most of the 2nd week off. And then the 3rd week, I was able to lay on my back more instead of just my side, and so I worked I worked that week. But, yeah, I probably took,
Colleen
00:19:46 – 00:19:47
I don't
Aaron
00:19:47 – 00:20:08
know, 10 days of PTO. Yeah. The 1st week was the darkest because I couldn't lay on my back, and so literally I was just laying on my side, which means I can't, like, use my computer. So I'm laying on my side watching Cocaine Cowboys on my phone and was just, like, super depressed. Yeah.
Aaron
00:20:09 – 00:20:18
So and Jennifer's, like, handling, you know, caring for the twins all by herself, and it was just it was kinda dark.
Sean
00:20:18 – 00:20:25
Oh, yeah. Tough. Like logistics of trying to help yourself while you can't even Yep. Sit up.
Aaron
00:20:26 – 00:20:39
Yeah. So she's she's caring for, you know, 2, 3 month olds and a husband that can't, like, get up and get food by himself and needs new ice packs every hour, and it was brutal.
Colleen
00:20:40 – 00:20:40
That's awful.
Aaron
00:20:41 – 00:20:44
Yeah. So good news. Good report.
Colleen
00:20:46 – 00:20:48
That's wonderful. That's wonderful, Darren.
Aaron
00:20:48 – 00:21:04
Yeah. Thanks. I'm really, like I can't I told the doctor this. I said, I bet you hear this all the time, but I am just so grateful, and I feel like I got my life back, and I'm really appreciative. And he was like, oh, we just need to get you back on your feet.
Aaron
00:21:04 – 00:21:13
Yeah. I bet he gets it all the time. But, you know, obviously meant a lot to me cause it's this, this is the first time I've had back surgery. So
Sean
00:21:14 – 00:21:16
yeah. Hopefully the only time.
Aaron
00:21:16 – 00:21:35
Hopefully the only time. Yeah. The, the plan of action now is to lose like £20 and gain some core strength and flexibility. So Yeah. I'm too old to do nothing, unfortunately, which is a real pity because I'm not that old.
Colleen
00:21:36 – 00:21:38
No. You're really not.
Aaron
00:21:40 – 00:21:45
So those are my ailments. Sean, are you are you sleeping? How's your sleep window?
Sean
00:21:46 – 00:22:06
Still going. Still an experiment. I feel like it's definitely consolidating. But, yeah, this will be I'm coming up on the end of the 3rd week, which is totally normal. Could be, you know, taking another week or 2 for me to really see it dramatically improve.
Sean
00:22:06 – 00:22:30
But, like, last night, I was right. So I was up till 12:30. I still woke up at 6, but I think I woke up one time, and really only for, like, a few seconds, and then went right back to bed. So that's, that's good. Normally, in the past, you know, I'd stay up that late, and then I just would toss and turn and get I would feel like utterly trashed the day after gaming, typically.
Sean
00:22:31 – 00:22:37
But I feel sleepy, but fine. So it's it's definitely different. It's, I think it's happening slowly.
Colleen
00:22:38 – 00:22:42
Okay. Do you track it? Like, your do you have one of those monitors that tracks your REM sleep?
Sean
00:22:43 – 00:22:45
Yeah. So those are garbage. Okay.
Aaron
00:22:46 – 00:22:46
Those
Sean
00:22:46 – 00:22:49
are totally useless. Yeah. But the How
Aaron
00:22:49 – 00:22:50
do you really feel?
Sean
00:22:52 – 00:23:16
Well, no. I just know, like, from being an insomniac, of course, I'm an expert in everything to do with sleep and sleep related, technology. Those are those are atrociously bad at detecting sleep stages, especially deep sleep. They're not useless, because maybe you could use them consistently and get some sort of like directional data. It gives you like, yeah.
Sean
00:23:16 – 00:23:28
Alright. So this night was a little bit worse than the last night. But then also at the same time, usually, you could tell because you just wake up and you feel like you're not as refreshed. So Yeah. Overall, you know, those aren't particularly useful.
Sean
00:23:28 – 00:23:49
But the what I do is, yes, I am I am keeping a sleep log, just for my sanity, so that I could see like, oh, okay. It is indeed like consolidating and somewhat improving. But it's a simple, like, time in bed. Like, when do I when did I turn off the lights and go to sleep? When did my alarm go off and I got out of bed?
Sean
00:23:49 – 00:24:13
And then how long did it take me to fall asleep? And how long do I think I was awake? And then I list a subjective, like, sleep quality, and then, like, how rested do I feel number on, like, scale 1 to 10. And so it's mostly subjective. And, like, most people over report how much they sleep.
Sean
00:24:13 – 00:24:46
So, like, if I feel like I slept for 7 hours in a 7 and a half hour window, probably it was well, so the the science on that is that if you feel like you're an 8 hour sleeper, you probably sleep closer to, like, 7 or 7 and a half hours a night. Don't even realize it. So, like, the more you think you sleep, the more off you probably are. And then the lower your number is, like, usually the correlation gets a little bit tighter. But either way, it's just for me, like, subjectively, because that's really what matters.
Sean
00:24:46 – 00:25:04
It's not like it's subjectively, how do I feel? Do am I starting to feel like my sleep is accomplishing more things for me? And that's definitely starting to happen. Like, it feels my sleep feels different for sure. I also have a thing that records me snoring, which is just something I'm curious about.
Sean
00:25:04 – 00:25:14
Like, how how bad do I snore? And are there some nights where it's worse than others? And does that make it worse or not? That's basically it. The thing about being an insomniac is,
Aaron
00:25:14 – 00:25:14
generally speaking, you don't want to track
Sean
00:25:14 – 00:25:27
your sleep. That's bad. Generally speaking, you don't wanna track your sleep. That's bad, because the insomniac is, like, the main problem is you're just obsessed with it. So, like, you're like, oh, sleep is, like, a problem I have to solve.
Sean
00:25:27 – 00:25:55
And I worry actually about these sleep trackers and people that, you know, have kind of, like, poor quality sleep but are susceptible to, these types of thoughts. I actually think they'll probably make things worse for people rather than better. I actually worry about that a little bit. But anyway, insomnia topic over. I I could talk about that for a long time, so we'll just we'll just say, yes.
Sean
00:25:55 – 00:25:56
It's ongoing, but getting better.
Aaron
00:25:57 – 00:25:59
And not using a sleep tracker.
Sean
00:25:59 – 00:26:00
Got it. Okay. Correct.
Aaron
00:26:03 – 00:26:11
So you posted a screenshot of something interesting this week. Y'all were looking at, a thing called what was it called? Command bar?
Sean
00:26:11 – 00:26:12
Yeah.
Aaron
00:26:14 – 00:26:27
Is that what it was called? Yeah. Command bar. Command bar dot com. So this is like, it's like a spotlight or a finder or an Alfred or any of those quick action things, but for your web app.
Aaron
00:26:28 – 00:26:47
And so they're they're I think their model is similar to ours, where it's like they've built this, you know, seemingly really complex thing, and you can just buy it and drop it into your web app and add the actions, and you're off to the races. And so you don't have to build you don't have to build all this stuff.
Sean
00:26:47 – 00:26:49
Theirs is one above ours.
Aaron
00:26:50 – 00:26:59
Okay. So you took this internal to your company. So tell me tell us what it was, how it's different, how it's the same, and what the conversation was like.
Sean
00:26:59 – 00:27:21
So command bar. Command bar is one step above us in terms of, I think we're low code. Command bar is no code. So you buy command bar and then, you know, there's some tiny amount of work you have to do to get it into your app, but then at like probably just a script tag or something. I don't I don't know exactly what it is, but then they have a web like interface.
Sean
00:27:22 – 00:27:40
You can log in and then set up your rules and actions and stuff like that in the in the web interface. That's also where they track the number of users that you have, and that's how they charge. Sorry. I was running, so now I'm out of breath. Okay.
Sean
00:27:40 – 00:27:51
So Yeah. So I I brought that up with my with my boss. It's like, hey. This would help us with some of our navigational issues. It'd be like a quick thing we could drop in.
Sean
00:27:51 – 00:28:17
It doesn't work for us because we're on prem. I didn't realize that they had this other step where you had to, like, have access to the Internet and our stuff frequently does not. So so it doesn't work for us. But before we even really realized that, the conversation started right away into why don't we just roll our own? And I think that that is like going to be our primary competitor.
Sean
00:28:18 – 00:29:03
Is people wanting to or thinking it's trivial to just roll their own, which in some cases will probably be true. So, like, how many of those types of customers we scoop up, I think depends on the marketing that we do, how we acquire customers Mhmm. And, like, what channel they come through, how much education we've done to get to the point where they're making the sale, and then also the price. So, a higher price is going to push more of that type of customer into rolling their own. If it's like a, we just need like this one off.
Sean
00:29:03 – 00:29:36
We don't need all of the full features that this thing offers. So we have to keep that in mind in terms of how we package our offering, how we do price Oh, what's the word I'm looking for? Well, how we price discrimination, basically, like, how do we put get our pricing so that the the right customers pay the right amounts, basically?
Aaron
00:29:36 – 00:30:02
So, tell me how the conversation like, how did the conversation about command bar progress? Y'all you said you mentioned, like, should we roll our own? Where did that where did that lead you before, I guess, you discovered that command bar wasn't viable at all. What what were you all talking about and what would have, like, what would have helped command bar sell it to you to say like, no, This is actually very hard. Don't roll your own.
Aaron
00:30:02 – 00:30:03
Do you know what I mean?
Sean
00:30:04 – 00:30:37
Yeah. Right. So I felt like at that moment, when he brought up, well, we could just roll our own. Well, if if they had had in their marketing copy something that was like, you know, here are all of the things that it does, or here are all of the challenges that you'll have trying to write your own. Like like, for example, I could see a landing page where it's like, have you because a lot of people have tried to roll their own query builder or, you know, kinda half ass version of a query builder.
Aaron
00:30:37 – 00:30:38
Mhmm.
Sean
00:30:38 – 00:30:57
And that is something that most people know is hard. So just like a like if you've done it. So then like a a small reminder of like why that's a pain and why you don't need to do it. Something that might make sense for us to to have in our copy. For the command bar, it doesn't make sense because they're a no code solution.
Sean
00:30:58 – 00:31:14
So developers are not their market. So why would they do that? They don't really care about us. They're like, well, those guys are going to probably be a pain in the butt to convert because they're gonna think they can roll their own. So let's get that.
Sean
00:31:14 – 00:31:16
And here we are. Go to the marketing department. Yeah.
Aaron
00:31:17 – 00:31:17
Okay.
Sean
00:31:17 – 00:31:28
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And that's the that's the other thing is like, is there is there a no code route that we could follow? I think about that a lot with this.
Sean
00:31:28 – 00:32:06
It's like, I don't think we should right now, especially since we're not, like we are developers, so we know developers, and that's an advantage. And we gotta, like, fire on all cylinders, take advantage of every advantage that we have. And one of the advantages that we have is we're developers, and so for audience as developers, that's, advantage to us. So but something to, like, think about and keep in mind, in terms of we know we talked about, like, there's the first step of the company, getting to, like, 2 to $500,000 a year or something like that. Then how do we get to that $3,000,000 a year company?
Sean
00:32:07 – 00:32:22
Can we do that with just, you know, with just our audience, with just that type of marketing? Or is there something else we need to do to get there? So I'm just starting to think about that.
Aaron
00:32:22 – 00:32:43
Yeah. I think no code I think that's great. And I think the way that we could do that is, like, the integrations that we've talked about. Right? So instead of integrating with Laravel Nova, which is low code still, we would integrate at a platform level with something like Bubble or any of these other I don't know.
Colleen
00:32:44 – 00:32:44
Webflow.
Aaron
00:32:45 – 00:33:06
Webflow. Yes. Any of those. And I don't know if that's like plug in marketplace or whatever, but being able to offer that kind of stuff inside some existing no code, platform seems seems like a good way to go. It will be much cheaper, but the volume could be much higher.
Sean
00:33:06 – 00:33:31
Yeah. Exactly. But every time I think about that, it's so it so integration is definitely the route to go. There are some places where we can do an integration and still be targeting developers, and that's not that big a change, and that's just a good channel and we should try to do that. But then, as soon as I start thinking about integrating into, like, I don't know, Shopify I mean, I guess there's Shopify consultancies.
Sean
00:33:31 – 00:33:51
There's probably ways that we could do it and still be doing it with developers, but there's probably an advantage to doing some kind of Shopify integration that is just like a one click add on for your for your items. You know? That's no code. But then that's a totally different customer. So something to think about.
Aaron
00:33:53 – 00:33:56
That sounds fun. Mhmm.
Sean
00:33:57 – 00:34:18
Yeah. And that's the thing. Like, these I really think that getting into platforms like this is absolutely the way we make this an actual, like, large business or, you know, large in quotation, air quotes, like to us type of business. So that's that's kinda where my mind is at right now with that longer term stuff.
Aaron
00:34:20 – 00:34:25
Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. When you pasted that screenshot oh, sorry. Colleen, go ahead.
Colleen
00:34:25 – 00:34:29
Actually, doesn't Margaret have a Shopify empire? Or she did?
Sean
00:34:29 – 00:34:29
She did.
Colleen
00:34:29 – 00:34:32
Yes. We should talk we remember before she burned it to the
Sean
00:34:33 – 00:34:34
we should never talk
Colleen
00:34:34 – 00:34:36
to her about it when we see her.
Sean
00:34:36 – 00:34:41
Exactly. That's that's, like, one of the top things I wanna talk about while I'm there.
Colleen
00:34:41 – 00:34:42
Yeah.
Aaron
00:34:42 – 00:34:51
Yeah. She's coming, right, to the retreat? She's able to get a ticket? Yeah. So this is a big reveal cause I've never revealed this.
Aaron
00:34:51 – 00:35:19
I have a secret Shopify store that I haven't launched yet, but I went through, I built it out and it's ready to go. I just need to like actually pull the trigger on it, but there's a filter plugin there and it's not great. Like, it's it's bad. And that's definitely something that Shopify doesn't offer out of the box. And so I think that would be a great place to to have one.
Colleen
00:35:20 – 00:35:22
What are you selling at your station? I
Aaron
00:35:23 – 00:35:40
knew that question was coming. Let me grab one. This is, like, a first ever. This has never been revealed to anyone anywhere, and now I'm gonna have to launch it. Do y'all remember Calvin and Hobbes?
Colleen
00:35:40 – 00:35:41
Of course. Yeah.
Aaron
00:35:41 – 00:36:03
And how how lovely and wonderful it is? So last year in, like, oh, probably May or June, the tax season got real slow, so, like, work slowed down. Jennifer and I were having a real tough time trying to get pregnant. It was the pandemic. It was just it was a bad time.
Aaron
00:36:04 – 00:36:45
And so I was looking for, like, something away from the computer, like, something kind of physical to do and to just, like, zone in to something that's not sitting here and being depressed in my house, like everyone else in the country. And this idea that I've had for, like, honestly, 5, 6, 7 years is to take Calvin and Hobbes. There's a I forget what it's called, the complete collection where it's printed on heavyweight paper, to take Calvin and Hobbes books and cut them up, cut out a single panel and then matte and frame it. So I have, like, here's one of them. It's real reflecty.
Colleen
00:36:46 – 00:36:46
Cool.
Aaron
00:36:46 – 00:37:20
So I take I find panels that work well as singles, and then I have these double mats, where I map them and then I frame them. And so you end up with, like, an 8 by 10 Calvin and Hobbes single panel. I've got a couple others hanging around here. And then some of them, like the title pages, can be full 8 by 10, artwork, and so those end up being, like, 16 by 20 when they're all matted and framed. And so it's like a Calvin and Hobbs art website.
Aaron
00:37:20 – 00:37:41
And I also have you can see it. Also have these Calvin and Hobbes mugs. Ignore the thing in the top. So it's like a silhouette of Calvin and then a silhouette of Hobbes on the other side. And so, yeah, I've got the whole I've got the whole website set up.
Aaron
00:37:41 – 00:38:11
I've got all the stuff matted, and I missed so the thing was I missed the holiday season last year, and I was like, okay, I'm just going to wait until next year. But now that it's September, it's probably time to turn it on. So, yeah, I have I have a Shopify store with that sells physical physical products. And it's, well, I'll save the domain for now, but, yeah, it's fun. So there you go.
Aaron
00:38:12 – 00:38:31
Random fact of the day. Nice. I think the last thing we probably need to talk about is the October launch and leading up to that. So we wanna talk about the view and our plans and timing on that stuff?
Sean
00:38:32 – 00:38:49
Yeah. So I'm pumped about just getting started on that this weekend. I've got so Isaac is at a sleepover, so it means tomorrow, she's being best. So I should be able to work out. Should be no big deal for me to work out with her for me to just work on it tomorrow a bunch.
Sean
00:38:49 – 00:39:05
So what I'm my plan is get it loaded back into my brain Mhmm. Step 1. And then step 2, talk with you, Aaron, because you expressed interest in pitching in potentially this weekend
Colleen
00:39:05 – 00:39:05
Mhmm.
Sean
00:39:06 – 00:39:19
To figure out how you could. So I'll k. I just need to know what I'm doing first. And then, and then I'll be able to break it up, and we can both, bang on it this weekend and see how far we get. Okay.
Sean
00:39:19 – 00:39:43
And if we could probably make sense to line up when we're working on stuff, potentially. So that way I don't know. I think if we just do like, we back in the good old days, we just screen share for a couple hours and then work on code or, you know, like Okay. Do a video call. But, yeah, that's that's all I'm at with that is, like, okay.
Sean
00:39:43 – 00:39:54
Time to start working on it. I've only got a couple of weekends to to do it. So we'll see what's possible. Seriously? I there was some discussion about view 2 versus view 3.
Aaron
00:39:54 – 00:39:55
Mhmm.
Sean
00:39:55 – 00:40:28
I don't think it's likely whatsoever that we'll be able to do both by, you know, our, like, soft launch deadline that we were self imposing on ourselves. Okay. But I'll look at it and see see what I think. I think it'd make more sense for me to just ignore that and just get the Vue 2 thing working for now and be like, hey, maybe we could do the Vue thing and Vue 3 thing and squeeze it in. But the thing about that is there's, like, I I don't even know how to, like, we have it set up, so we're building a package right now.
Sean
00:40:28 – 00:40:39
But like, I already forgot how I did that. And I have almost zero experience setting that up. So there's this whole ball of wax there that I need to get into to make sure I'm doing that the right way.
Aaron
00:40:39 – 00:41:03
I actually actually spent a lot of painful time last week or the week before figuring that that out for some torchlight packages. Perfect. So I can I can do some of that, or I can help with some of that? But it it is extremely frustrating, and it really it really made me mad. So I have some learnings there that I can help with.
Sean
00:41:04 – 00:41:09
Okay. That's that's perfect. That will be awesome. So I have no interest in learning about that whatsoever.
Aaron
00:41:10 – 00:41:18
It's a new game. And I think you claimed did you claim the Hammerstone organization on NPM? I think you did.
Sean
00:41:18 – 00:41:24
Long time ago. And yeah. But did I I had that set up wrong too. Like, I
Aaron
00:41:25 – 00:41:26
Yeah. Okay.
Sean
00:41:26 – 00:41:33
I remember, like, I did something I did something dumb when I set that up, and I can't remember what I did. Okay. So we'll have to I'll look at that.
Aaron
00:41:34 – 00:41:34
That's fine.
Sean
00:41:34 – 00:41:39
Or you could look actually, you look at that because Yeah. If you add me I'll do the code. Yeah.
Aaron
00:41:39 – 00:41:53
Yeah. If you add me, I can I can start working on the packaging if you keep working on the code? That Colleen, that's one of those, like you're talking about infrastructure stuff where you gotta, like, set a bunch of garbage up. This is the worst one. Like, I just wanna write the code.
Aaron
00:41:53 – 00:42:00
I don't wanna deal with the goddamn packaging of ESM, common JS, whatever all that garbage is.
Sean
00:42:01 – 00:42:04
It must be bad because you almost said a swear word.
Aaron
00:42:04 – 00:42:10
I know. I know. That's how mad I am. You guys should know. Yeah.
Aaron
00:42:13 – 00:42:18
Jeez. Okay. Yeah. So keep going. Did you have anything else there?
Aaron
00:42:18 – 00:42:19
You're gonna get it loaded
Sean
00:42:19 – 00:42:20
That's it. Started?
Aaron
00:42:20 – 00:42:21
Okay.
Sean
00:42:21 – 00:42:26
Oh, yeah. There's one other thing. We have to reach out to Adam Wathan. Is that how you say his name? Wathan.
Sean
00:42:26 – 00:42:28
Or actually Wathan? Wathan? Wathan. Okay.
Aaron
00:42:28 – 00:42:28
Mhmm.
Sean
00:42:28 – 00:42:37
Sorry, Adam. Yeah. We need to reach out to him to make sure that we're cool to use Tailwind UI. I I'm pretty sure we are, but we just need to send him
Aaron
00:42:37 – 00:42:41
an email to say. For our, like, form elements that we're distributing.
Sean
00:42:42 – 00:42:47
Yeah. Yeah. Based on my reading of their license, we're good, but just we should we should.
Aaron
00:42:47 – 00:42:55
Yeah. I think that's a courteous thing to do. I I agree. I think we're okay. But once we have something that we can show him, I think that would be the courteous thing to do.
Aaron
00:42:55 – 00:43:04
Mhmm. Yeah. Smart. I forgot about that. I think that's probably it.
Aaron
00:43:06 – 00:43:12
Do y'all have anything else? Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.
Aaron
00:43:12 – 00:43:15
Okay. Well, I think we'll end it there then.
Me

Thanks for reading! My name is Aaron and I write, make videos, and generally try really hard.

If you ever have any questions or want to chat, I'm always on Twitter.

You can find me on YouTube on my personal channel or the Try Hard Studios channel.

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